Re: [ox-en] A name for a peer-production-based society?

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Stefan Merten wrote:
> Hi Raoul and all!
>
> Last month (34 days ago) Raoul wrote:
>   
>> A name for a peer-production-based society ? ...
> Once I used the term "GPL society" for what I now would call a society
> based on peer production. "GPL society" was nice in a way because it
> was a quite artificial term with a high perplexity. But it was also
> wrong in a number of ways. For instance the GPL would no longer be
> needed in a society based on peer production... In any case I'm not
> using the term any more - instead I use clumsy constructions like
> "society based on peer production".
>   
Yeah, GPL has an unhelpfully legalistic/contractual frame.
>> In any case, it is obvious that nowadays using the words socialism or 
>> communism without specifying the meaning given to them is source of 
>> important confusions.
>>     
Yeah, mort political terms have already been spun by the establishment.
"Socialism" is hopelessly so, if 2 million are ready to march against
it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1213056/Up-million-march-US-Capitol-protest-Obamas-spending-tea-party-demonstration.html
I use "altruism" to describe my work, since this word still has many
positive connotations and a suitable etymology.
> When Oekonux started 10 years ago I very consciously used an
> artificial word as a name to not run into this problem. I still think
> this was a good decision :-) .
>   
Works well in German, but I think it's a daunting word for non-German
speakers, in terms of the vowels, and ending in an "x". e.g. It's not
intuitive how to make an adjective/adverb out of it.
> But for naming a type of society this is probably not a viable
> approach?
I had a similar problem with "altruistic economics", and I'm still
uncertain how wise it was to name it "economics". Many non-economists
switch off when they see the phrase, since they assume that without a
background in economics, they won't get it. Economists meanwhile take
one look, quickly discover it's not 'proper' economics (e.g. no money)
and so dismiss it as nonsense. Describing it, use of words like buy/sell
would have been useful for their denotation, but were saddled with
unacceptable connotations, so to avoid the implications of competition,
I opted for alternatives such as 'donor' and 'recipient'.

It is worth spending time to think of suitable names, since this decides
how people categorise stuff, and therefore which frames they apply to it.
c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28social_sciences%29>. Familiar
words make it easier for people to understand (or to think they
understand, which may not be good).

Robin Upton



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